Sheila O’Connor’s love of written letters was the impetus for her new middle-grade novel, “Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth.”

Set in a small Minnesota town in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, the story is made up of correspondence between feisty 11-year-old Maureen “Reenie” Kelly and Mr. Marsworth, the town recluse who went to prison for being a conscientious objector in World War I.

“The letter form, the epistolary novel, has always intrigued me,” said O’Connor, a poet, fiction and nonfiction writer who teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul and edits the literary journal Water~Stone Review.

“I have boxes of letters still, exchanged with people I went to camp with,” she said. “We all knew how to write a letter and our letters had voice and story and jokes. Letters are an art form I loved as a kid and I still love a good letter.” Then she acknowledges, with a tone of regret, that letter writing is an art that’s disappearing in this age of email and tweets.

“Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth” is an involving story holding big issues — the confusing emotions surrounding the draft, love of country, love of brothers, what the Vietnam War did to towns and families and what a tenacious (if sometimes over-enthusiastic) girl can do.

“I tried to capture what a national crisis, a national divide, looks like to a child who is trying to make sense of extreme factions of right and wrong, exacerbated by living in a small town,” O’Connor said of Reenie. “I have heard many historians say that we are in a time that mirrors 1968 in terms of divisiveness.”

O’Connor’s two previous adult and two middle-grade novels had strong young female protagonists, and she continues that theme with Reenie, a firecracker who insists Mr. Marsworth become her pen pal whether he wants to or not.

Reenie and her older brothers, Dare and Billy, are sent to live with their grandmother after their mother dies, they lose their house and their father takes work in North Dakota. When Reenie gets a paper route, she introduces herself in a letter to Mr. Marsworth, who doesn’t answer his door, assuring him she will do a good job and suggesting they correspond. As the story continues, Reenie tells the gentle man about what’s going on in her life, including fights with two bullies, one of whom is the sheriff’s son. Most of all, she is trying to get 18-year-old brother Billy into college so he isn’t drafted and sent to Vietnam..

Reenie hates the war and writes to President Lyndon B. Johnson urging him to stop the draft because young men are suffering and dying, according to her pen pal Skippy, who’s serving in Vietnam. Skippy counsels her to do whatever it takes to get Billy into college.

Reenie is endearing, tenacious, enthusiastic, ready to put the whole world right. She’s sometimes exhausting in her rush into life, the kind of girl who writes, “Every bone inside my body is blowing up with joy!!!” As her brother puts it, “Saying no to you, Pup, is like talking to a wall.”

“Reenie arrived to me spunky and full of fight, an actual fistfighter,” O’Connor said. “I don’t know that we acknowledge all the time that female characters can be equally as scrappy as boys. Hopefully, in the course of the book as Mr. Marsworth encourages her, she learns to put that scrappiness to better use.”

Although he’s courteous, Mr. Marsworth first says he cannot be Reenie’s pen pal or her “good deed project,” but he’s drawn into the friendless girl’s life. As a pacifist, he urges her to always find a way to be peaceful, even against the bullies. (That does not go well for Reenie and her brother.) Eventually he invites the Kelly kids and their friends to swim at his long-abandoned cabin. He also becomes Reenie’s ally in her fight to get Billy to college even though the family has no money. There’s something of a mystery here, too, because Mr. Marsworth hints at knowing things about Reenie’s parents.

O’Connor, who’s lived for 28 years in the Morningside neighborhood of Edina, says writing this novel was so complex it took five or six years to complete.

“I always try to do something difficult in every book,” she says. “Here I was trying to unfold a story entirely through the constraints of letters that had to contain plot and all the dramatic action, implications and subtext.”

“Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth” will be published in April, the month the war ended 43 years ago. It was a war fought by middle-schoolers’ grandparents, but O’Connor isn’t worried about whether a 10-year-old would be interested in something that happened before she was born.

“I am not saying (in the book) one way or the other about military service. But this is something even young people might understand,” she said. “Children all over the U.S. now have family members that are going to be registering for the draft, which still exists.”

Besides, O’Connor said, “with all my books for young readers I hear from people of all ages. I believe people are smart. I believe if you have a listener — the reader — on the other side of a story you are telling, you have an obligation to the listener to tell a story that has been worth their time. I have great faith in the intelligence of young people that comes from working many decades as a poet-in-the-schools, reading, writing and listening to their insights. I believe young people are looking for intelligent, important books. They are definitely interested in books that will challenge them to think of another time in the same way they are interested in ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ Kids have always been interested in historical fiction or in landscapes that in other ways are very foreign.”

Another important part of “Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth” is that the characters live in a small town where families’ roots go back generations. Some of the folks are furious at Billy for writing what they consider an unpatriotic letter to the newspaper about following his conscience in deciding whether to fight. In retaliation, Gram’s window is shattered with a brick and she’s kicked out of her card club. Billy loses his job at the service station. But when Reenie and a friend stage a peace walk, they find surprising allies.

“I tried to give a sense of what it feels like to enter new, closed communities as an outsider,” said O’Connor, who lived that experience. She was born in South Minneapolis and later her family moved to Mound and then to Savage and Prior Lake.

After graduating from Holy Angels Academy in Richfield, she earned a degree in English at the University of Minnesota, then a master’s in poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she decided to focus on her writing.

O’Connor was teaching poetry and fiction at the Minneapolis-based Loft Literary Center and working as a COMPAS poet-in-the schools when she married her husband, Tim. They have a 29-year-old daughter, Mikaela, and a 26-year-old son, Dylan.

She also began her first novel, “Tokens of Grace,” published in 1990 by Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions for adults. That was followed by “Where No Gods Came” (2003), also for adults, winner of the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction and a Minnesota Book Award.

O’Connor turned to children’s books in 2011 with “Sparrow Road,” which won the International Reading Award. It’s about a girl whose mother takes a job at an artists’ colony where there is a no-talking rule, so she begins to write a journal to make sense of what’s happening in her life.

In her most recent middle-grade novel, “Keeping Safe the Stars,” three orphans have to hide the fact that the grandfather with whom they live is in the hospital and they are fending for themselves.

“So many things I write are, first and foremost, a family friendship story, about family loyalty and love,” O’Connor said. “In ‘Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth,’ there is this unexpected friendship between two people bridging generations and sensibilities. How do two unlikely people become friends? The intimacy with which all these people live and share conflicts is something that is timeless.”

O’Connor spent a lot of time at the Minnesota History Center poring over old newspapers and documents to get the feel of the 1960s, including reading stories about boxer Muhammad Ali, who refused to go to Vietnam, and anti-war pediatrician Dr. Spock.

“What would these stories do to Reenie when she reads them in the newspaper?” O’Connor asked herself. The answer in the book: Reenie considers them heroes.

O’Connor also became interested in how conscientious objectors were treated throughout American wars.

“Mr. Marsworth’s experience in World War I was quite harrowing. He went to prison,” she said. “There were leaders among the Quakers that changed treatment of C.O.s, or had a vision for a different model. By World War II, they were serving in camps and other places and doing valuable work.” (In Vietnam some volunteered for dangerous duty as field medics.)

Now that Reenie has made friends with Mr. Marsworth, O’Connor is turning her attention to revising her forthcoming adult novel, tentatively titled “V,” to be published in fall 2019. She describes it as “a hybrid that has fiction, nonfiction fragments, historical archival documents that come together to create a puzzle experience of me trying to relocate a missing character. I’ve never done a book like this before.” Also In the pipeline is a book that draws on a little-known story from Minnesota history.

“Writing is just something I am deeply involved in all the time,” O’Connor said, “but I am dedicated to telling these stories.”

Mary Ann joined the Dispatch-Pioneer Press in 1961 when there were two papers. She has been a fashion writer, a women's columnist and the women's department editor who brought "society" pages into the 20th century. She was named book editor in 1983, just when the local literary community exploded. She has won the Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award, a Page One Award and YWCA Leader Lunch Award. She retired in 2001 and works part time. A graduate of Macalester College, she lives on St. Paul's West Side in a money-sucking Victorian house with assorted old animals.

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